I took it upon myself to search for and contact the bitmarket.eu people directly, i.e., not via admin@bitmarket.eu.I got a response from them today, 3 December 2011:

Quote

Hello,

First of all we're sorry for this situation. We understand that you and our other users who are in situation where their funds are blocked can get angry about it. We definitely would pay more attention to this, but there are few reasons why at the moment we don't. Biggest of these reasons is very simple - we were hoping that the site will pay for itself and our time they we invested in it (and we keep doing it, because it's hosted on a VPS server which costs us ~$40 /month). And now, when Bitcoin price has gone to record lows, we just have to work on other things to pay for our livings.

That being said we don't want to leave our users alone with this problem, and plan to do few things to aid this situation: - first of all, we'll invest some time, starting today, to straighten things for our users that have their funds blocked by malicious buyers/sellers. There are few dozens of these cases as I see now in our inbox, this should take no longer than few days. - second, I, as a developer of bitmarket.eu, plan to implement a simple mechanism that will automatically cancel a transaction and return funds to seller when the buyer doesn't respond. This should eliminate need for us to assist those cases, which in turn end up well for us as well as our users.

I hope that this explanation satisfies you. Should you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

That sounds good. It's also good to finally get a response.

PS: I may have threatened to release his personal information to a horde of angry users if he didn't respond. Seems to have worked

They've been back up for a month now. I haven't heard of any new issues.

they were gone for a good half hour and just now got back up.just a liiiittle scary for me since I had a half-boatload of BTC up there.i might have been a little edgy ever since bitp.it disappeared with a half dozen of my unconfirmed BTC from mining there, too.

They hold user funds hostage over a $40 a month vps fee? These guys should be run out of town with pitchforks. If they end up reading this I can recommend http://www.bitvps.com/ so you can pay with your users bit coins instead of cash.